1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to computer network maintenance tools, and more particularly, to a maintenance tool for configuring network manageable devices of a computer network.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recent market research has shown that consumer demand for local networking is driven by the rapid growth of the Internet, high-speed Internet connections and multiple household personal computers (PCs). Local networks are designed to allow PCs, peripheral devices, and other consumer electronic devices to share voice and data over a single network. Local networks may be a local area network (LAN) or wireless LAN (WLAN).
Setting up a local network requires users to provide information about how to configure the computers, firewalls, Ethernet settings and addresses, file sharing, printer sharing, Internet connection sharing, wireless addresses and other parameters specific to a particular local network. The setup of a network requires configuring the network manageable devices properly, and the configuration of the manageable devices is managed through user interface software. The user interface software (hereinafter the “setting interface”) allows a network administrator or user to configure and manage a single network manageable device. Network administrators or users expect the setting interface to be navigable, quick and safe. The setting interface should enable a novice network administrator or novice user to perform routine operations, to permit a user to tackle a network problem with a timely response, to enforce privilege levels and reconfirm commands that impact service.
Conventional setting interfaces comprise monitor prompts for setting registers, form-based dialogs, menu-based systems, command languages and natural-language parsers. Typically, for the purpose of configuring a network manageable device, the access to the network manageable device is through a Telnet connection, a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) connection or a simple network management protocol (SNMP) connection. The setting interface and the access to a network manageable device are generally controlled by a management application installed in each of the computing devices that communicates with the network manageable device.
Presently, setting interfaces are not standardized by the networking industry, thus each vendor provides a different set of device-specific commands to set the network manageable device and a different form of connection to access the network manageable device. In many instances, the same set of device-specific commands cannot be used on all of the network manageable devices.
To date, a large number of setting interfaces are provided allowing the configuration and management of different types of network manageable devices. The lack of a standardized setting interface requires the users (e.g., system administrators or technical support personnel) to be familiar with the various setting interfaces. Furthermore, the lack of a standardized setting interface limits the ability to develop a generic application programming interface (API) for management applications to manage and configure the various types of network manageable devices.
Therefore, in the view of the foregoing discussion, it would be advantageous to provide a generic solution that would allow management applications to configure, through a single interface, network manageable devices regardless their type and manufacture.